The Conduit: Chapter 14

Anu made it to the bottom of the wall first. The climb hadn’t been as bad as she imagined. It was Jonas who struggled, and he was still only halfway down. As she waited, Anu used her light to get a good look at their surroundings. Things were more amazing than imagined. The entire world they dropped into was something that shouldn’t exist.

“Hurry up old man!” she yelled to her partner.

A minute or two later, Jonas’s feet landed on the ground, and he began to detach from his harness. He was out of shape for such a challenging climb, but had done it and felt proud of himself. Turning to find Anu in the distance, he yelled at her, asking what she was doing. Anu’s attention was squarely on what they’d come to see, which, compared to the view from the drones, was an ominous find. As Jonas tried to get her attention, he watched as Anu flipped her light back on.

“Dear God.”

The temple inside the mountain wasn’t what they thought. The carving work was amazing, as was the construction, considering primitive man was all that was on Earth. But Jonas saw what Anu saw. Whatever this place was, it was meant to keep something hidden from the world. It was also designed to ward people off if they ever find this place. As Jonas looked at the granite carved stones lining the walls and corridors into the side of the chamber, he knew they were walking into the mouth of something. From the inside, with a wider light, the opening to the temple was carved into the form of a face, and an inhuman one at that.

“What the hell?” he asked aloud.

“Something to make earlier man leery of entering,” suggested Anu.

“This far up?” Jonas questioned. “Why would they be worried about getting this far up?”

Anu reminded him that the mountain was formed over a few thousand years of volcanic activity, and as the pressure from the volcano pushed upwards, the mountain changed over a few millennia.

“Are you sure about that?”

Anu chuckled. She wasn’t a geologist, and she definitely had no understanding of Volcanology. She was trying to calm an old man’s fears; she tried to explain. Jonas had stopped in his tracks as much as she had. Anu found it funny that he had the same response, and wasn’t telling Jonas that she could feel her heart beating through her chest because the idea of walking into the mouth filled her with anxiety. She faked being ready to go.

First, they were going to have to set up their tents. Both carried a small tent for expeditions like this. As they set them up, facing each other, Jonas kept looking over his shoulder, amazed at what was possible more than ten thousand years ago. When he was done with his tent, Jonas knelt and laid out several items. One of the items Jonas didn’t travel without was his knife. Along with that, he carried a small medical kit, a rope, a bottle of water, and gloves when he did expeditions.

“Are you ready?” asked Anu.

“Now I am,” he turned.

The two started walking toward the mouth of the chamber, looking at what he recognized as two eyes looking down at him. Jonas felt the eeriness of the approach. Much like Mona Lisa’s eyes, the eyes in the wall gave him the strange sensation that they were being watched.

“Before this part of the world was nearly always freezing, the eyes served as a point of watch for the ones tasked with overseeing this hideaway,”

“That makes sense,” admitted Jonas, relieved by the idea.

Max walked on ahead of Anu, shining his light down the main corridor, following the corridor until they located the jail chamber. As he walked along the stone-floored chamber, he wondered where the remains of the survivors were. There were usually skeletal remains, at least a few, especially when there were places where people were held captive. He hadn’t seen any skeletal remains on the probe videos, and they hadn’t stumbled across any in the corridor or outside the main temple.

He stopped in the corridor, looked right and left, and turned to Anu. They were at the entrance to the jail corridor. It was pitch dark, and I was starting to detect an odd odor. There was the stench of sulfur mixed with copper and a faint hint of methane. Jonas had smelled similar odors before. There was thermal venting into the mountain. They were excavating inside a volcano.

“Jesus,” he sighed. “This place is active again.”

“The mountain?”

“Yeah, the volcano’s active,” admitted Jonas.

Anu started to get closer to the entrance to the corridor when Jonas grabbed her by the shoulder. He gave her a hand signal to stop. Jonas remembered the drones from the team dropped in from the overhead opening. They hadn’t gotten the clearest views of what would be an on-foot approach.

He cracked some glow sticks and threw them into the corridor. It was meant to guide them across, but none of them landed at level. Jonas leaned into the corridor, finding the missing piece to the puzzle. The path to the jail chamber wasn’t clear. There was a deep pit where the path would be, and it was a pit for those who were left to guard the ancient prison.

“Look,” he said, pointing his flashlight.

Anu looked down, her face changing. She stared into the darkened pit where dozens of skeletal remains rested in their final place. Anu realized these were the remains of the people who built the bizarre and monolithic structure inside the mountain. She knelt at the edge, staring fifty feet into the belly of the mountain. She was staring at the remains of forty to fifty of the mountain people.

“It’s a mass burial ground,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” replied Jonas. “Look at the way their laid in there. None of them went in at the same time. This is where they went as they died off, one by one over the eons.”

Anu and Jonas knew that meant there would be more, or at least one more. The last of their kind wouldn’t have had someone to put his remains there. They would have died wherever they were when it was their time.

“How do we get across?”

“We don’t,” said Jonas. “We’ll have to find another way around.”

How they were going to get around the pit, he didn’t know, but it would be easier than what Anu was about to suggest, and a hell of a lot safer. As Anu told him to stop, she aimed a launcher at the center of the corridor ceiling and fired. Eighty feet of rope now hung from the center, attached to the end of the device.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t figure we’re going to find another way around in a short period of time, so I’m going across. Or, I’d hoped, we were going to go across.”

“Are you nuts?” he questioned.

Anu laughed, “Haven’t you ever seen that really old movie where the princess and the farm boy swung across the opening of the space station?”

Jonas couldn’t believe his ears. Was she actually considering using Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia’s solution from when they were trapped aboard the Death Star? Was she actually considering using a movie stunt as the solution for their problem? The idea was preposterous.

“It’s either this, or we climb down, work our way over the remains of whatever those things are, and then climb back up,” she explained, spelling out their immediate choices. “Besides, there’s no guarantee there is another way to the jail chamber.”

She was right. They could wander around there for days and not find another path that granted access to the cells, which was where they had to get to. Jonas took a deep breath and told her that if this got him killed, his mother was likely to come hunt her down. As he took the rope and wrapped it snugly around him, pulling tight to test how seated the harpoon was in the rock, he nodded at Anu.

“Any chance you remember the important part, the part about what she gave him for luck?”

“Eww!” A sound escaped her, “Don’t you remember, they were brother and sister.”

Anu wrapped her arms tightly around Jonas, and they simultaneously moved toward the ledge and jumped into the swing. Wind whipped against their faces as they sped across the opening, getting closer to the opposite edge with each second. When they landed, Jonas and Anu both fell into the stone walls along the side before collapsing on the flooring.

“Let’s never do that again!” yelled Jonas.

Anu smiled. She thought to herself, what a pussy, but smiled and nodded her agreement. The two dusted themselves off and caught their breath. They were across and could see the jail chamber a mere fifty feet away.

“You know, if we don’t find another likely exit from the detention area, we’ll have to do that again,” Anu laughed.

“Don’t remind me,” sighed Jonas.

Max was frustrated waiting for Susan to have something for him. Don’t go down there without talking to me, she said. Who does she think she is? Max didn’t like subordinates telling him what to do, even when they were right. Susan was going to have to explain herself, and he wasn’t waiting until it was convenient for her.

He left his office and made his way to the turbo lift. Pressing the button for level two, Max expected her to be in the main laboratory. She was supposed to be finishing up the lab results on Carter's blood and tissue samples. As he got to the med lab area, Max yelled out.

“Susan! Where are you?”

Susan didn’t answer. Why wouldn’t she answer, thought Max. Where was she? Max took his sidearm out and began slowly searching the med lab, clearing it one section at a time. He cleared everything from her office and then told himself he better not find her napping while he’s been wracking his brain trying to figure out why Jane could get into his head so easily. Max knocked at the office door but got no answer. He pounded harder before calling her name.

“Come on Susan, are you in there?”

As commander, he had a master key that would open all the doors aboard the station. He rarely used it, because he didn’t always want to see what people are doing when they think they’re alone. Fumbling through his pockets, he found the master pass card key and slid it into the lock. Her office door opened with a ‘swoosh’ sound as it disappeared into the bulkhead.

She wasn’t there, either. Where had she gone?

Max grabbed his radio and called Chief Morrow. He ordered the Chief to switch to channel three, which was the secure channel only division heads and the station chief could access. Once there, Han acknowledged he was on three and waited.

“Look, Han, find me a twenty on the doctor, but keep it between you and I,” he asked Hanson.

“Is there a problem, boss?”

“I’m not sure. She was looking into something for me and was supposed to be in med lab. I’m down here and the place is deserted,” he explained.

Han radioed back, “Well, that’s dammed irregular. Regulations are for one person to be on duty in the med lab at all times. Why wouldn’t one of her staff be there?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Max. “See if you can get a twenty on her. Video ID her and see where she’s at.”

“Ten, Four,” responded the head of security.

While Hanson Morrow was working on locating the chief medical officer aboard the station, Max started to rifle through Susan’s papers. She was messier than he thought, he told himself as he looked through the things left on her desk. There was a printout of a back ledger with her name on it. Max wondered what the station’s only doctor got paid so he looked for payroll deposits. What he found was more puzzling.

“Jesus Christ,” he sighed.

He was looking at a three-month printout of the doctor’s financials, and she was receiving weekly wire transfers for over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Somebody was sending her just over a million a month.

Max questioned, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

As he stared at the numbers, his radio went off. He answered, and it was Hanson with the results of the video search. And it was as he feared, Susan wasn’t aboard the Oceanic. She’d gone AWOL again.

“Call the launch, find out if she took another one of her excursions out to the Starry Night. I swear, if she’s back on that dammed yacht I’m going to scuttle it to the bottom of the ocean and tell the Navy that she went down in the middle of the night,” demanded Max.

“Aye boss,”

Susan was piloting a launch alongside the Starry Night yacht when an alarm went off in her pocket. She pulled a digital device out and could see Max Shepherd sitting at her desk. Her heart skipped a beat. She wasn’t ready for Max to find out about her financials. It was far too soon.

Susan climbed aboard the mysterious yacht and made her way to the second level before going down some stairs into the bowels of the craft. She tapped on a wall three times and listened for the three in return. When she heard the three in return, she unlocked the false wall, and it opened to reveal a man in black commando gear.

“It’s been more than a couple of days,” he sighed.

“I’ve had a hard time getting away. There’s been a murder and the commander’s had the station locked down. Security was doubled,” she admitted.

“And what about Jane?”

“I got Shepherd to hold off interrogating her any further. I think she was about to crack and give him her name,” admitted Susan.

“Then we’ve got very little time,” said the soldier.

“Listen, Preacher, she was going to spill her guts about where she was from, and I stopped it from happening. How about filling me in?”

“Doc, do you like the payments you’ve been getting?”

She nodded.

“Do you want to keep getting them, even after this is over?”

Susan nodded again. “Of course I do.”

“Then don’t ask questions. Just do what we’re paying you for, and get me close to the Oceanic,” he ordered.

Susan told Preacher they were going to have to move quickly since she was sure that by now her insubordination had been discovered. She knew Max wasn’t overly patient and the timing wasn’t perfect. Seeing him at her desk, he no doubt had questions about her bank ledger. She wasn’t telling Preacher she’d screwed up. She’d take the heat with the commander. The worst he’d do is lose faith in her and toss her off the Oceanic; she hoped that would be figurative.

“These should allow you to attach to the launch. The diving equipment is fully aired and it’s not that long of a boat ride, even going slower for you being below. But there’s still a lot of risk,” she admitted. “Do you think you can do it?”

“I’ve done worse,” he said, slinging a duffel over his shoulder.

“Alright,” said Susan. “If you’re ready.”

Preacher climbed into the water and attached himself to the side of the launch while putting one of the magnetic handbars on the belly of the small craft. He gave Susan the nod, and she fired up the twin outboards. She’d have to keep the speed down compared to normal, but that was alright. Susan needed time to calm down. What she was about to do was serious, and by now, she feared Max had figured things out. She knew she was about to be detained.